The NEA has spent many, many millions to attack and defeat school voucher initiatives around the country. The reason is clear. If the Great Wall of Monopoly around socialist public schools is opened so that poor and middle-class parents can in effect get their tax money back, millions of parents will move their children to private schools.

Helping the NEA wage a propaganda and political war against vouchers and parental choice have been several leftwing groups, including People for the American Way (PAW), its tax-exempt PFAW Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the NAACP and its tax-exempt foundations. Their main targets as well as allies are Democratic lawmakers. Their victims are African-American parents, who polls consistently show are heavily in favor of school vouchers.The NAACP’s response is to offer a 40 page “Plan of Action” for education on its website that calls for lots more government money for public schools, quotes the NEA, but never mentions vouchers or school choice for black parents.

Evidence that school vouchers are supported by most African-American mothers and fathers is largely suppressed by the left-dominated national media and by so-called “civil rights” leftwing groups. A Joint Center survey found that among blacks 26-35 years of age, more than 70 percent support vouchers and school choice, and Hispanic-Americans aged 18-25 do, too, by more than a two-to-one margin.

But when the head of Colorado’s NAACP Willie Breazell in 1999 announced his support for school vouchers to help poor kids “trapped in our very worst schools,” the national NAACP promptly purged him.

“I was kind of lynched, so to speak,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “If you don’t have the group-think mentality you won’t last.”That Politically-Correct group-think is the conformist party line of the left, which liquidates dissenters who try to put the well-being of kids first, and not coincidentally it is the line taught to our children by the NEA.

This June, after years of struggle for emancipation, the black children of Colorado were locked back in chains as Democrat appointees to the Colorado Supreme Court voted 4-3 to overturn the state’s new voucher law as unconstitutional on the grounds that it stripped local school boards of control over education.

For lawyers of the NEA’s Colorado Educational Association, it must have been hard to keep a straight face while making this ridiculous argument. The NEA nowadays uses its political money and muscle to buy politicians on city councils and school boards so that at contract time it controls both sides of the bargaining table. The Colorado legislature will pass a new voucher law. Such programs, as Jon Sarche of Associated Press has reported, “have withstood legal challenges in Cleveland and Milwaukee. Washington, D.C., is scheduled to begin using vouchers this fall, and Florida’s program is operating while a state appeals court considers a challenge.” Like emancipation from slavery, this is an idea so morally and humanly right that its eventual victory is inevitable. But how much longer must our children be slaves of an unethically-imposed Democrat socialist school system and socialist teacher unions?

“Those of us who have long dismissed the National Education Association as a tool of the Democratic Party have been badly mistaken,” wrote columnist William McGurn in 2001 in the Wall Street Journal. “Apparently it’s just the opposite. As documents now sealed under a judge’s order indicate, it’s the Democratic Party that is the tool of the NEA.”

The Democratic Party traces its origins to Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who whatever their virtues were also slave owners. The Democratic Party prior to the Civil War was indisputably the party of the plantation slave owners, and of groups like the Northeastern big city machine politics Irish immigrants who did not want to compete with freed slaves for jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder. In the wake of the Civil War the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, segregation and the police dogs of Bull Connor.

Only occasionally did the Democratic Party deviate from using racism to win politically. President Harry Truman, e.g., much to his credit integrated the U.S. military. Truman had been a hood-wearing member of the Ku Klux Klan in Missouri, quitting not because of its bigotry against blacks but against Roman Catholics. Even in 2004 the senior congressional Democrat is Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Grand Kleagle of the Klan who still occasionally uses the “N” word in speeches.

But African-Americans were seduced away from supporting the party of the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln and into supporting the party of the plantation slave masters, Klansmen and segregationists who chained and lynched their ancestors.

Today’s Democratic Party continues to be America’s racist political party. Only the favored races have changed, not Democratic use of racial polarization and hatred to gain votes in a cynical game of divide-and-conquer.

How ironic that this party of the slave masters now depends on the votes of slave descendants for its power. African-Americans, who a century ago comprised almost 20 percent of our population, are now a rapidly declining 12 percent – but, like an echo of yellow-dog Solid South of segregation days, this group votes almost monolithically Democratic. Democrats in recent elections have gotten 18 percent of their votes – and hence almost all of their victories – from African-Americans.

This Democratic Party dependence on getting 90 percent or more of the votes of a declining black minority to stay in power has created surreal politics. The reason is obvious. If even another 10 or 15 percent of African-American voters grew tired of being taken for granted and cast their ballots instead for a new emancipation, for Republicans, the Democratic Party would be doomed. Its power would vanish almost overnight.

Democrats therefore cannot afford to let any black voters escape from its welfare plantation. To keep them in political bondage the Democratic Party must keep blacks in political segregation. It must keep African-Americans separated from success, from a good education that would open their eyes to a larger world outside the Democratic Party. Democrats must segregate blacks from prosperity that would end their dependence on welfare and give them reasons to dislike high taxes, and from the experience of equality that might transfer their loyalty from a selfish Democratic Party to patriotism for America itself.

The Democratic Party has many leftwing co-conspirators who strive to keep African-Americans politically segregated. One is the NAACP, which preaches racial division and hatred. Another is the NEA, which in public school classrooms has replaced the empowering Three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic) with a debilitating new socialist Three Rs (racism, recycling and reproduction) to encourage feelings of victimization, resentment, immediate gratification, and dependence on government as the solution to all problems.

The Racist Triangle of these three selfish organizations is mutually reinforcing. How and why is complex, but is also now easy to see.

The NAACP and its highly-paid leaders would have no reason to continue if African-Americans attained equality, prosperity and an end to racial differences. Democratic Party racist politics and the NEA’s dumbing down of black children guarantee that millions of African-Americans will be poor, frustrated and resentful. And the NAACP, like black slave bosses on antebellum plantations, use fear, threats and insults (like Kweisi Mfume on June 12calling black conservatives who dare to vote for the party of the Great Emancipator “ventriloquist’s dummies”) to herd fellow African-Americans to do their white Democratic masters’ bidding every election day by voting for the slave owner party.

“They’re buying people for a few bucks a head,” said Mfume to the 2004 NAACP convention, “because they know that some of us come cheap…real cheap.” And who is more vivid, uglier living proof of this that Kweisi Mfume?

But every African-American vote for a Democrat merely locks the chains tighter around black wrists and ankles, because both the Democratic Party and the NAACP would lose their power and money if African-Americans ever escaped from their bondage.

The NAACP, despite claiming to have half a million members, in 2002 got 75 percent of its $36 million in revenues not from member dues but from donations, mostly from large capitalist companies. Several million dollars in its budget came from anonymous donors, and the partisan political activity of its closely-connected front groups such as the National Voter Fund and 527 committee Americans for Equality have raised serious legal questions as to whether the NAACP is entitled to tax-exempt status.

“The NAACP should know about funding from big groups,” African-American journalist Armstrong Williams told the Washington Times, “because it is funded by liberal white organizations. It gets money and backing from the [National Education Association] [and] the AFL-CIO.…” Could it be that the NAACP fights against vouchers and choice for poor black parents because NAACP leaders are pocketing rich and perhaps secret donations from two teacher unions, the AFL-CIO’s American Federation of Teachers and the NEA?

The NEA, as Brimelow wrote, “is critically dependent on legal privileges and favorable public policy.” Its wealth and power depend on a government-maintained monopoly of public schools, and this requires that no tax dollars be diverted to vouchers that parents could use to send their children to private schools. (The NEA is very “pro-choice,” supporting abortion with “no government limits,” but it zealously fights to deny parents any choice concerning their children’s schools.)In exchange for protecting the NEA’s (and AFT’s) public employee monopoly, the Democratic Party is paid back with vast amounts of campaign money.

As with other labor unions, the NEA functions as a giant money-laundering machine for the Democrats. Democrats impose laws that let unions take a big piece of every employee’s paycheck, which in public schools comes from the taxpayers. And the unions pay for this power and privilege by splitting this extorted taxpayer money with partisan Democrat politicians to keep the machine operating.

Public schools are an ultimate example of this synergy, not only because they are government monopolies but also because already-taxed parents are required by law to school their children, to offer their offspring as hostages to this money-extorting government-union machine.

The NEA produces generation after generation of children kept ignorant, brainwashed with leftwing ideology and taught to be dependent on government by government school teachers. Our socialist public schools thus act as incubators producing future Democratic voters and anti-voucher NAACP members to keep the iron triangle of racism in power.

And although money and power are the deepest goals of all three organizations, all also share the religion of the left, a neo-Marxist, neo-humanist vision that individual human beings mean nothing and the collectivist socialist future in which those like themselves will rule means everything.

This is the red varnish, the cosmetic rouge that lets these selfish little totalitarians pretend to one another and to their bathroom mirror that their ill-gotten money and power comes from benefiting humanity. The millions of black lives they are destroying mean no more to today’s leftwing Democrats than Stalin’s and Hitler’s millions of victims meant to these earlier socialist leaders.

But parents want their children to succeed, thrive and have opportunity. To that end Rev. Floyd Flake and other like-minded parents and leaders like talk show host Armstrong Williams and Ohio’s African-American Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell have joined hands to create the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), which aims to give poor parents the same choice between union-dominated public schools and the high-quality private schools that rich people like John Kerry have always enjoyed. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of this Microsoft founder announced that it was giving BAEO $4 million over a five year period to build 15 small high schools. BAEO and similar constructive initiatives are supported by President George W. Bush’s Administration and his No Child Left Behind to end what President Bush has long described as the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

“Shame on us for not realizing that there are parents in this country who…today support vouchers not because they are enamored with private schools but because they want a choice for their children,” said Senator John F. Kerry in 1998. “They want alternatives, and seeing none in our rigid system, they are willing and some even desperate to look elsewhere.”

In 2004, however, presidential candidate Kerry is begging for money from the NEA, and this week he got on his knees to kiss the rings of the racist, anti-voucher NAACP leaders Julian Bond and Kweisi Mfume at their national convention. Kerry then offered this gathering the traditional clenched-fist salute of the 1960s Black Power movement – and of international Communism. He will never again repeat his 1998 momentary deviation into truth-telling and genuine concern for black children. Like most Democrats he is owned – or should we say enslaved? – by these heartless leftist organizations.

A handful of entrenched Democratic politicians, from California U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein to Connecticut U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, have on occasion supported experimenting with vouchers to help poor parents save their children from bad unionized public schools, as has former Atlanta Mayor and civil rights leader Andrew Young. But this can be politically risky for those on the left. When black Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams came out for a voucher program to help low-income parents, African-American Democratic D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton snarled that he was “a sellout.” But, of course, it was she who had sold out black parents and their children for 30 pieces of silver from the NEA.

“You do not own, and you are not the arbiters of, African-American authenticity,” is the message Secretary of Education Paige addressed to the NAACP’s Julian Bond and Kweisi Mfume in the July 15 Wall Street Journal.He is righteously angered by what he has called their “hateful and untruthful rhetoric about Republicans and President Bush.”

Secretary Paige last February described the National Education Association as a “terrorist organization.” He promptly apologized but should not have done so. The NEA has for its own selfish motives has maimed and destroyed countless young African-American lives. This damage and its incalculable legacy of sorrow, crime, drug addiction, violence and other ills across generations is literally a crime against humanity.

The NEA responded by claiming, falsely, that Secretary Paige had called teachers terrorists and demanded that he be fired. Studies have shown that as few as 40 percent of NEA members are even Democrats, the remaining 60 percent splitting evenly between Republicans and independents. The NEA holds many of its teachers’ jobs and paychecks hostage, using their dues to bankroll politicians these teachers oppose. The nation’s leftist media, of course, made no attempt to probe what Secretary Paige’s accusation meant. And in its arrogance, the NEA continues to spend its money buying politicians and privilege for itself instead of paying reparations, or even apologizing, to its millions of victims.

Where do NEA teachers send their own children? As Linda Chavez and Daniel Gray document in their book Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and

Corrupt American Politics, 36.3 percent of union teachers in Chicago send their own kids to private schools, as do 39.7 percent in Cleveland, 36.7 percent in liberal San Francisco and nearly half, 44.6 percent, in John Kerry’s liberal Boston.

Would you dine at a restaurant where the cook would not let his own children eat the food? Maybe one way to reform public schools, and to help save millions of African-American children, would be to require NEA and AFT teachers, NAACP officials and Democratic Party politicians to send their own children to public schools.

A better, faster way to save these children is to break the racist triangle at the one place where Americans will have a choice this November – by voting against every Democrat on your ballot. They never represented or cared about you and your children anyway. Most have long been wholly-owned subsidiaries of the teachers unions and other sinister groups on the radical left.

Mr. Ponte co-hosts a national radio talk show Monday through Friday 6-8 PM Eastern Time (3-5 PM Pacific Time) on the Genesis Communications Network. Internet Audio worldwide is at GCNlive .com. The show's live call-in number is 1-800-259-9231. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.

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